Helen gives me spare turf from the new lawn she’s laying in her own garden. I lay it around the greenhouse and in my hidey hole at the back. It makes the garden look instantly green, pulls it together somehow. The greenhouse is bursting with ripening tomatoes, chillies and aubergines, the red-onion squash is threatening to take over. The teasels are nearly finished and the Verbena bonariensis and Knautia macedonia are gearing up to take centre stage.
The house sparrows are finally here. Ever since I changed the seed in the feeder. Now when I wake I hear them outside my bedroom window. When I open the back door there’s a flush and a flurry of action, little brown bodies flying up into the holly to the left, the buddleia to the right. They launch from the pond leaving droplets in their wake. They’re settled now and I love them for it. Eventually they’ll have shelter to rival the holly and buddleia, long grass to gather caterpillars for their young. I made a home for house sparrows and the house sparrows have come.
When I work they are with me. Never in the garden proper, although sometimes four or five come and sit on the wall, crane their necks, daring each other to hop in with me still around. They never do. It’s like they’re telling me, I’d like a bath now, I’d like some food now. Go back inside and let us have the garden again. Cheeping alarm calls to each other while flying, impatiently, between the holly and buddleia.
In the morning, sometimes, I open the curtains slightly and sit in bed with tea, watching them through the crack. They’re still so shy, fly off at any sudden movement. But if I’m still I can watch them for a while. They arrive in a big gang of around twenty. They use the box bush for shelter, some keep sentry on the wall. There doesn’t seem to be a pecking order; if one wants to eat and another is in its way then it simply lands on the other’s head. Maybe more dominant birds land on less dominant ones or maybe it’s just a free-for-all.
It’s getting warmer and the garden is growing. Borage is leafing up and developing flower buds, roses are weaving into their space. I find plume moths amongst the foliage, hoverfly pupae on leaves, froghoppers, a centurion fly. Life.
It’s 8 a.m. when I first step outside. I shoo two large white butterflies out of the greenhouse, where they’re forbidden from laying eggs on my broccoli and Italian kale. I walk the few steps around the garden and pause to watch them mating before the female drops down onto a nasturtium leaf and rests awhile. Before long she starts laying. Sitting on the edge of the leaf she curls her abdomen underneath it and squeezes out an egg on the underside in a single motion: dab. She curls her abdomen back up for a second and then reaches it beneath her again: dab. A few more times: dab dab dab. She can lay as many eggs as she likes on my nasturtiums, that’s what they’re there for. Others have found them before her and the whole back fence is a mass of nasturtiums laden with eggs and tiny caterpillars. It’s lovely to see (as long as they stay away from my broccoli and Italian kale).
Elsewhere is a butterfly desert. On runs now I look for caterpillars. I scour nettle beds in Hove Park and St Ann’s Well Gardens, along Brighton’s train tracks and in forgotten beds in supermarket car parks. Caterpillars mark summer. They tell us the world is still turning, the systems are still working. But this year I can’t find any.
Many of Britain’s fifty-odd butterfly species lead obscure lives in carefully managed habitats but there are around twenty that would come into our gardens if we’d let them. Butterflies need nectar to give them energy to fly but they also need caterpillar food plants: leaves on which they lay eggs and which their caterpillars can eat; leaves that enable them to complete their lifecycle. Each butterfly has its own food plant which it has evolved alongside: the small and large whites so hated by kitchen-gardeners lay eggs on brassicas: cabbages, broccoli, kale. But they will also lay on nasturtiums and that’s why I grow them. The holly blue lays eggs on holly and ivy; the brimstone on common and sea buckthorn. The most colourful ones that we draw as children, that bounce around on buddleia in late summer, all lay eggs on nettles.
When I first started searching for caterpillars, I didn’t know what to look for. I would stand in front of a patch of nettles and feel lost. I didn’t know whether to look at the tips or further down. I didn’t know what the tent constructions the caterpillars made for themselves looked like, whether they resembled cobwebs or if the things I found on nettles actually were cobwebs. All I knew was that small tortoiseshell, peacock, red admiral, comma and painted lady butterflies laid eggs on nettles and that the caterpillars of some species fed communally and sheltered beneath large silk tents, which they moved every so often as the nettles were eaten. I was told those of small tortoiseshell and peacock were easiest to find.
It took a few years of looking but one day I found them. I was in Cornwall with Mum, Ellie and my little sister Anna, who was born when Ellie and I were teenagers. It was the summer everything changed, the summer of my break-up. The week was marked by giant blue skies and running to the sound of skylarks, and a backdrop of great, crashing grief. We drank Cornish ale and took long walks. I found a slow worm. It was lying, cold and stiff, in the road but still, just, alive. The day was cold and full of rain. I picked it up and popped it in my pocket – a warm place for this cold-blooded lizard. We headed to the nearest pub where we knew there was a large compost heap, all warm and with plenty of food – a happier place than a cold, rain-soaked road.
By the time we got there it had died. I was devastated. It had probably been run over, it probably couldn’t have been saved. Mum choked back tears as I laid it down anyway, in case it would revive, and covered it in a thin layer of grass clippings for warmth. At the edge of the compost heap was a small patch of nettles. And on these nettles were lots of little black caterpillars. Oh.
With an old ice-cream carton I returned later to the compost heap, and snipped nettle leaves laden with caterpillars into it. I took only six; Mum named them after the wives of Henry the Eighth. Each day I fed them fresh nettles and cleaned out the box. I watched them shed skins as they grew and developed their intricate small tortoiseshell markings. I videoed them munch leaves in an anticlockwise direction, spin into a chrysalis. Poor Jane Seymour was parasitised by something gruesome.
It’s funny, writing about that time. That week was horrendous. Despite the skylarks and the walks, the soul-searching and the comfort from those who are a part of me, I was desperate, in shock, a raging, crying, running mess. Each day I ran along the cliff edge until I was breathless and felt sick. And then I would return to my family and we’d get ready to take another walk, have another lunch. Because all we could do was carry on. And I know now that, despite the running and the first, enormous wrench of shock and loss, I was OK, I was functioning. I was running, I was eating, I was trying to rescue slow worms. And I was keeping small tortoiseshell caterpillars as pets.
I learned a lot about caterpillars that year. I’ve raised more since, once a whole load from a patch of nettles that had recently been sprayed. It’s a nice way to measure summer, to involve yourself in the delicate cycle of life, remind you that the world still turns no matter what is going on around you or within you. And it’s easy, really.
But this year there are no caterpillars. Not on the nettle beds in Hove Park and St Ann’s Well Gardens, along Brighton’s train tracks or in forgotten beds in supermarket car parks. The nettles are eerily quiet, eerily lush without wriggling things to eat them. And it’s terrifying. The smaller things, the systems that so often go unnoticed, are dying without us even realising. Conservationists talk of abundance and percentages and our eyes glaze over but the evidence is plain for all who will open their eyes: butterflies are disappearing and they’re doing so on our watch.
Two days after I took those first six caterpillars I returned to the patch of nettles to find it had been strimmed and added to the giant heap. It was too late to pick through the remains looking for caterpillars, they had all dispersed and probably died. Turns out those six I had taken I had saved – are their descendants still flying or did they too lay e
ggs on nettles that were cut down?
It seems there are more white caterpillars than usual this year but I wonder if they just seem more abundant in the context of the loss of the others. Sometimes I fear large and small whites are the future of Britain’s butterflies, that they will be all we have left, and people will still hate them. Garden butterflies need gardens, yes. But in those gardens they need nectar and nettles – specifically nettles grown in sunshine. And that’s the problem: those who love their gardens usually baulk at the thought of growing nettles in full sun; those who don’t love their gardens still wouldn’t want them. It’s the same on our verges and allotments: health-and-safety fears, years of castigating them as weeds. Oh, but they’re ugly. They’ll sting my kids. Add to that the changing role of gardens: they’re becoming smaller, more like outside rooms. There’s more decking and paving, fewer plants and less soil. And the plants we do grow for them are often fresh from the garden centre and therefore laden with a cocktail of pesticides and fungicides. The butterflies drink it down in the nectar and then what happens? Do we know? No. Can we guess? Yes. We’re poisoning the plants and paving over the land and our butterflies are in free-fall. Most of us are too busy and frazzled to care.
I find eggs on my broccoli and Italian kale and transport them, diligently, to the nasturtiums. Already large chunks have been taken from the leaves. The next generation of small and large white butterflies is on the march.
In my hidey hole no one can see me. I’m mostly in the shade, only my feet in baking sunshine. The air is thick with insects; hoverflies buzz around fennel flowers, butterflies tumble among the browning teasels, wasps hunt caterpillars like sharks. Helen’s white-tailed bumblebees, still in their box at the back of the border, feast on the nectar from a hundred blooms. It feels like a garden; it is a garden.
The borders are full; there’s no space left to plant things. And yet there are plants waiting to be set free from pots and greenhouse shelves. I have nothing to do now except wait. Wait for things to die down, for the tomatoes to ripen, for herbaceous plants to seed and go over so I can cut back, chop, make room for other things. It will be only a few weeks. After that the half-life of winter will force me indoors, to plan and sulk and wish for spring.
The grass is growing and prospecting queen ants furrow among the blades, looking for a suitable spot to start a nest. One couple lands clumsily on the sweet peas, locked in coitus, the male quickly discarded. I close my eyes and listen to the hum of insects. I could be anywhere, I could be in one of the most established gardens in the country. But I’m here. Here in my space with my plants and my bees and my blades of grass and my prospecting queen ants. Beside me lamb’s ears and willowherb buzz with a thousand bees. There’s a small, rusty-looking bee that resembles the wool carder and it enjoys the lamb’s ears with a similar aggressive, darting flight. Anthophora furcata, or the toothed flower bee, I think. A new species for the garden. To my right common darter dragonflies lay eggs in the pond. It’s only three months old and it’s not even full. The red male and greenish female mate on the wall, a marvellous feat of heart-shaped gymnastics known as a mating wheel, which is also odd and uncomfortable-looking. Afterwards the female flies over the pond and pauses, repeatedly, hovering over the water and dabbing her abdomen into it. Baby dragonflies. If you believe, they will come.
The house sparrows have seen me and are shy. They hide in next door’s buddleia. A few at a time land on the wall and crane their necks cautiously, looking around, before the bravest sails in to take a few sips of pond water. Any movement or sound from me triggers its departure, thuuuuur, a wet dog shaking the sea off its coat, a deck of cards being flicked before a game.
They’re braver now. Time was I would never see them feed in the garden, let alone use the pond. Now I can sit, albeit in my little corner, and watch them bathe and drink in the pond, or squabble ten at a time over the hanging feeder in the gully.
I worry about them, specifically about next door’s buddleia. The tenants have been evicted and there are men in overalls decorating in the flat. I worry someone will come along and chop the buddleia down, leaving nowhere for the house sparrows to be. The house sparrows love that buddleia. When they’re in it I can hear them but not see them – that’s what they like, to be heard but not seen.
The house sparrow is a sedentary species. It lives in extended family groups in small territories, never straying far from its boundaries. When the food and shelter in that territory is removed, these family groups die out, rather than move on. It can be years before anyone really notices, such are their great numbers, but one day you look out of your window and the hundred house sparrows gobbling all your mixed seed becomes thirty, then twenty, then ten. Habitats are being compromised or lost in our towns and cities – a hedge grubbed out here, a front garden paved there, a ‘garden-office’ built somewhere else. Green space is disappearing from London at a rate of twenty-five football pitches per year and the house sparrow is going with it.
House sparrows have simple habits: they take shelter in large shrubby plants in which they can be invisible; they’re seed eaters but feed insects to their young; they live and nest in loose colonies, often in the eaves and roof cavities of houses. That’s it. To survive they need large hedges or shrubs, long grass and unclipped and untended patches of land (better for insects and therefore their predators), and somewhere to nest. But you rarely find these habitats in urban gardens, especially small ones, like mine and next door’s. The house sparrow is suffering for our modern tidy ways, for our penchants for a second or third car, for working from home, for not liking birds in the roof, for the lack of time or inclination to have outside space, for our population growth, for the halving of gardens when a house is divided into flats. In rural areas they suffer different types of habitat loss, plus greater levels of pesticides. We’re changing more quickly than they can.
Despite its popularity among pollinators for nectar in summer, buddleia isn’t such an insect magnet really. Its leaves are unused by most moths, leafminers, flies and aphids, whose larvae the house sparrows rely on to feed their chicks. The thing about buddleia is its size and sprawling nature, and its knack of growing in otherwise barren urban areas: cracks in walls, chimneys and other out-of-reach places. Introduced from China by the Victorians, it has caused problems in the wild because it out-competes native plants that provide much better overall habitats for insects (and therefore, ironically, house sparrows), but it’s a welcome refuge in cities. The Regents Canal in London, near where I used to live, is all gas stations, expensive apartment blocks, hipsters and gentrification. But where there are cracks in walls there is buddleia, and therefore still, but who knows for how long, house sparrows. I would run along the towpath and the sprawling mass of buddleia on the other side of the water would be noisy. All you could hear, for a huge stretch of towpath, was the cheep cheep cheep of house sparrows chatting to each other, completely unseen but heard all around.
Here, in Hove, in next door’s garden, the buddleia is one of a few plants along a long stretch of paved-over and suppressed gardens that provides a habitat the house sparrows can use. It’s not the best habitat but it’s the only one they’ve got. If it’s cut down, they will no longer have shelter when the cats or herring gulls come for them. And so they might stop coming to my garden, and then they might starve or be more exposed to cat strikes or have fewer successful nesting attempts due to fear and stress. The house sparrows were the first species I noticed when I saw this garden and they were the first species I tried to help, but my intention was to increase their habitat, not mitigate against future losses. As I took the decking up from my garden, someone else decked theirs three doors down. As I planted, so others removed. Whether the house sparrows can keep up with all the change I don’t know.
Sometimes I run up to Seven Dials and then down to the sea. On one road behind fast-food outlets and opposite a block of flats beneath a rooftop car park, there are huge Regency houses, converted into flats, and a c
orresponding sequence of small front gardens where house sparrows live. But the birds here are living on borrowed time. Already there are so few of them and they seem to spend most of their time in just one garden. It’s the messiest on the street, owned probably by someone elderly and infirm or a buy-to-let landlord who doesn’t care, and which the neighbours probably complain about. It has unclipped hedges and long grass and gone-to-seed plants. To some it might be an eyesore, a blot on the landscape of otherwise neatly paved ‘gardens’ with the odd pot of wind-and-sea resistant geraniums. To the house sparrows it’s a lifeline.
When the buddleia is chopped down I hope there’s enough for the house sparrows in my garden. I hope there’s more than a whip of an apple tree with three branches, twiggy shrubs and immature climbers. In theory, the plants I’m growing are better for house sparrows than buddleia. There’s honeysuckle, apple, guelder rose and spindle, two climbing roses and a couple of fluffy seed-bearing clematis. When lush and mature, they’ll provide the perfect habitats to nest and take shelter in, and all of them attract insects the house sparrows can feed to their young. But that could take five years, and the buddleia could be chopped tomorrow.
These little brown birds, which make so much noise, and steal food from our plates when we’re on holiday, are declining at a horrific rate. They’re a long way from dying out – still our most common garden bird – but the sudden and sharp drop in numbers should be an alarm call to us all. They’re doomed if we don’t help them.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 9